Mark Twain and Technology - Essay Example

Twain and Technology Mark Twain was a who embraced technology; he wrote the first novel in America to be written on a type However, hedid not view technology as a purely positive force for mankind. Knowing that technology tended to create as many problems as it solved, Twain took an ambivalent to at times negative attitude towards technology in his novel A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. By the end of the novel it seems as though one society is not better than the other; they are merely different. The protagonist, Hank Morgan, views himself as superior to the technologically and intellectually inferior people of the medieval society he wakes up in at the beginning of the story, but in the end the technology that Morgan brings does not have the lasting impact that he had desired: “Hank Morgan wants to dominate the past with sure-fire knowledge from the future, but all he achieves is a record of events that have no historical consequence” (Mitchell 231). While Twain is critical of the medieval society that doesn’t encourage thinking, he is equally as of critical of many of the modern conventions and technological advances that Morgan brings to the court. One of the first things that Hank considered to be of utmost importance was the newspaper. News used to only travel by messengers and through people talking to each other. Messengers could only reach a limited number of people, and news that traveled from person to person could be highly inaccurate. Newspapers could solve these problems by reaching a large number of people and by remaining the same story as told to everybody, and this was the reason that Hank started the newspaper as one of his first programs. This was the important aspect of information technology that Hank felt he was bringing to King Arthur’s court: “A newspaper has its faults, and plenty of them, but no matter, it’s hark from the tomb the tomb for a dead nation without it, and don’ you forget it” (78). When considered on its own merits, the newspaper is an effective tool to communicate information to a large number of people. Twain seems to take issue with other aspects of the way that the information is communicated. Beyond merely teaching the medieval society about using the printed word as a means of mass communication, he also taught them how to use a journalistic tone in their writing: “That is a good piece of war correspondence, Clarence; you are a first-rate newspaper man” (Twain 458). The journalistic tone is meant to be a succinct form of communication that includes the maximum amount of information while being as objective as possible. Twain seems to be critical of Hank in regards to his reaction to hearing Clarence’s report on the war. While the report is about the horrors of the war and the vicious battles that were taking place, all Hank is able to do is to admire the professional journalistic tone of the article. He is even more surprised to hear of Arthur’s death: ““I was utterly stunned; it had not seemed to me that any wound could be mortal to him” (Twain 459). While the article communicated objective information, it did not touch on the personal aspects of the war. Twain seems to want to say that while the journalistic tone might communicate a lot of objective information in the shortest space possible, it also loses part of the humanity involved with the reality of what happened. Though Hank views the use of the journalistic tone as an advance in communications technologies compared to the means of communication that the medieval society used, it seems as though it is merely a different way to communicate as opposed to being a better way in which people are able to communicate. While Hank is not prone to the superstitions and beliefs in magic that the medieval citizens are, Hank is not without his own prejudices. His problem is that he has a rather hegemonic attitude towards the medieval society: “More serious are the several instances where Hank sounds close to megalomania in his desire to reform the medieval world” (Carter 421). While there are aspects of the society that might not be positive, it is not without its positive contributions as well. Hank is unable to see this, and he desires to re-shape the medieval society to match what he was familiar with. This sort of attitude is indicative of the belief that there is some sort of linear progression to history and that progress always marches forward. In other words, he thinks his society is better than the medieval society because he thinks that society has improved itself through the centuries. While it might in fact be more technologically advanced, it is difficult to place some sort of actual value upon either society when considering that both societies had their own sets of problems. It could perhaps be seen as the main point of the book that technological and material progress are not essentially the final purpose and the entire point of all history: “Critics have read it as either ambivalent or as an attack on technology and the American faith in material progress” (Mitchell 231). Hank has no respect for the medieval viewpoint and he thinks he can solve all of their problems by forcing his own viewpoints on everybody. What he is not taking into consideration is that his own time period had all of its own problems to deal with. As his time period had its own problems to deal, he is not able to think outside of the mindset of his period even though he is in another time period. As he is from right around the beginning of a period of technological advances that would affect the quality of life for those living during that time, this has instilled within him the idea that his society is better because of the advances that we’re just starting to be made that made a difference in people’s lives. Without the ability to view another society as having its own unique positive aspects, Hank is doomed to fail in his attempts to change the society because he is completely incapable of understanding the society, and there is no way to affect any sort of change in a society if one is not able to in any way relate to it. In the end, the strongest point that technology does not make that much of a difference in people’s lies is the fact that nothing really changes at all in the society by the end. One could say that the difference between Hank’s society and the medieval society is just that they are different; there is no inherent value difference in regards to if one is better than the other. This is evidenced by the wide-spread abandonment of Hank’s values by the end of the book: “When those knights come, those establishments will empty and go over to the enemy. Did you think you had educated the superstition out of those people? (Twain 459). The medieval people had their own set of beliefs, and Hank disregarding this fact led to what could be viewed as a wasted effort. Hank tries to change the people and society, but he is not successful because he does not deal with the real problems of the society: “But it is unable to conquer what Twain considered the true problem: a society in which people do not think for themselves” (Beard, 1). Hank could be accused of having the same problem that effectively keeps him from changing the society; he is not able to think outside of the ways in which he society considered to be the proper way to approach living and society. As King Arthur is a legendary figure, it is easy to understand the idea of Hank not being able to fully grasp the idea of him being mortal like everyone else. When considering this example that was mentioned earlier, it is easy to see how Hank not only couldn’t change the medieval society because he had his own issues stemming from his own society, but he picked up some of the less than positive aspects of medieval society as well. While Hank initially was negative of people of believed in magic and superstitions, Hank seems to have picked up his own unreasonable beliefs such as King Arthur being in any way any less of a flesh and blood mortal man than anybody else. In this way Hank can be seen as hypocritical because he is in fact so critical of all of the people in the medieval society that would have had this sort of belief that a person could be not killed in battle after having received the kind of wounds that Arthur received. It would seem as though the medieval society had more of an influence on Hank than it did on him by the end of the novel. It is important to take into consideration that technology obviously isn’t a negative thing in and of itself; it completely depends upon the ways in which it is used. Though Twain wasn’t aware of the horrible inventions that technology would bring which would be used in WWI and WWII at the time of the writing of this novel, such as the atom bomb, he was able to envision how technology was able to be used for such a terrible purpose. Of course, technology did bring about antibiotics, which is something that would have vastly improved the quality of life for people in the medieval ages. Of course, as Twain as able to envision, most technological advances also brought about their own problems, such as the overuse of antibiotics leading to even more dangerous bacteria that are immune to such measures. Though not an issue in Twain’s society at the time, Twain was still able to have a firm understanding how he solution to one problem merely leads to the creation of another. This is the entire point behind a person coming from a more advanced society not being able to make the sort of changes to a more primitive society. Though Hank did bring many technologically advanced innovations to the society, he ended up creating the same sort of problems that his society was struggling to deal with and at the same time was not able to completely wipeout the problems that he was attempting to solve by the end. Though it might seem to be an underwhelming end that Hank left the society without making any positive changes, it is the entire point of the book that he was in fact unable to do so. Works Cited Beard, Carla, “Mark Twain and Technology,” 2007, available from http://fayette.k12.in.us/~cbeard/cy/ Carter, Everett, “The Meaning of A Connecticut Yankee.” American Literature, Vol. 50, No. 3 (Nov., 1978), pp. 418-440 Lerer, Seth, “Hello, Dude: Philology, Performance, and Technology in Mark Twains ‘Connecticut Yankee.’" American Literary History, Vol. 15, No. 3 (Autumn, 2003), pp. 471-503 Mitchell, Lee Clark, “Lines, Circles, Time Loops, and Mark Twains A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthurs Court.” Nineteenth-Century Literature, Vol. 54, No. 2 (Sep., 1999), pp. 230-248 Twain, Mark, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. Mahwah, New Jersey, Watermill Press, 1980. Zlatic, Thomas D., “Language Technologies in A Connecticut Yankee.” Nineteenth-Century Literature, Vol. 45, No. 4 (Mar., 1991), pp. 453-477. Read More